alliance of all, for the maintenance of the right of Kings to rule according to the precepts of Christianity. Their brotherhood is to be perpetual, the duty to help and countenance is universal, and the three Empires are thenceforth to be, for those purposes, only branches of one. Such were the formal stipula

tions of the treaty.

The King is to the nation what God is to the world. To him belongs might, majesty and dominion. To them pertain patience, gratitude and submission. Whatsoever is more than this cometh of evil: and its suppression is guaranteed by the treaty. This was the theory of the allies.

With this treaty in our hand let us open the history of Europe.

In the distribution of soil and souls, the Congress of Vienna was not forgetful of the cause of their trouble. The ghost of the revolution still stood before them, and they tremble at the apparition. They set a guard over maniac France; and distrustful of the competency of its keeper as well as of the completeness of the cure, they stipulated in their treaty an alliance to suppress the first manifestation of returning madness, whether apparent in symptoms of external mischief or internal aberration.

The Austrian Empire of agglomerated nationalities was at best a crazy structure, rife with the elements of ruin, and difficult to maintain even in calm and peaceful times. The whirlwind of revolutionary violence would instantly prostrate it. The fire of popular passion would involve in ruinous conflagration its dry and lifeless branches. The inspira

tions of modern reform, the allurements of popular sovereignty must bring the necessity and reveal the impossibility of uniting under one rule its various and adverse nations languages and laws. The very condition of its existence was repose. Its only unity was in its Imperial head. The instinct of his ambition made him the foe of freedom: and his policy not less than his principles deprecated the contagion of popular ideas-with which he was not in a condition to deal successfully or safely. His Russian brother's unimprovable people were safe neighbors on one side. The unchangeable unity of the Papal principles secured him from danger through the States of the Church on an other. But he anxiously guarded his Italian provinces from the dangerous example of freedom by solemn but secret treaties with Sardinia and Naples to repress all constitutional advance among their people-till he should be ready to take up the march of improvement. Against the perverse liberalism of Prussia, on the side of Germany, he was forced to rely on his own dead weight in her affairs; and he trusted to the unerring instinct and sympathies of despotic princes, to annul the ambiguous stipulations of the Federation.

The jealousy of Western Europe, unable to wrest Poland from the Czar, strove to prevent the consolidation of its provinces with his empire. They demanded, and Alexander accorded with seeming alacrity, a constitution providing a national administration and a separate army; and the shadow of Polish nationality was preserved by a separate coronation as King of Poland.

Alexander reciprocated the favor, and joined Prussia in forcing on the reluctant Austria some ambiguous provisions for free institutions for Germany. A substantial provision for representative assemblies was frittered away, by the perverse opposition of petty princes, and the lukewarm support of its proposers, into the illusory declaration, "That Assemblies of States will find place in all the countries of the Federation." The freedom of the press-whose alliance they had eagerly sought to arouse the great enthusiasm of the war of liberation,-was committed to the tender regard of a Diet of Princes against whom only it needed protection, with no better shield than the provision that, "at its first meeting the Diet will occupy itself with uniform legislation concerning the freedom of the press.

All these provisions stipulations and arrangements formed integral parts of the general settlement. The violation of any entitled all the powers to interfere.

The labor of the sovereigns was finished; and each returned to his several home to put in operation the complex machine.

The Holy Allies, a few years after-in 1818, met at Aix la Chapelle to consider the propriety of loosing France from her straight-jacket. Her sanity was pronounced sufficiently restored, at least under the guardianship of a legitimate King; and she was at once relieved of the restraint of their armies, and admitted to the alliance which dictated laws to the world. On this accession to their number, and at this solemn conclusion of the first act in the drama, they wisely resolved to renew the declaration of the

principles and to reduce to some certainty the objects of the association. It was therefore solemnly declared by Russia, Austria, England, Prussia and France, that they as well in their reciprocal relations as in those with the other European powers, were resolved never to depart from the principles of unity which had hitherto guarded them and which through the Christian brotherhood of sovereigns among each other would be indissoluble; that this union had no other object than to preserve the common peace, which depends on the conscientious observance of treaty stipulations and the rights flowing from them; that France reconciled to the other powers by the restoration of legitimate constitutional monarchy bound herself to contribute to the maintenance and consolidation of the system which had given peace to Europe, and was its only guarantee; and that the parties to the act, so far as they might find future conferences between the sovereigns or their plenipotentiaries for the attainment of their expressed purposes, bound themselves by diplomatic arrangements to settle the time and place of meeting; and formally to solicit the presence of any state whose concerns were to be the subjects of consideration.

The castigation of France had brought forth the peaceful fruits of repentance. But the joy over her conversion was clouded by the sullen temper and restless spirit of Germany. Three years had taught the Princes the meaning and the people the value of the lavish promises of popular assemblies, of freedom of the press, of liberal reforms, by which they had been lured into the war of liberation.

It was the idea of liberty, of the participation of the people in the high attributes of government, which was invoked by the Princes as alone powerful for their rescue. In its power they conquered; and the people fought under the illusion that their victory was their own. The promises of the Princes were interpreted in that sense; and in that sense was their performance exacted.

About the language of the promises there could not well be much dispute. The difficulty was in the consequences they were found to involve. The monarchs had said they knew not what; when their eyes were opened they drew back with terror from the gulf which yawned before them.

The Congress of Vienna began and ended with the affirmation of the divine right of Kings. The abandonment of absolute power by the monarch was never for a moment dreamed of. Yet the King of Prussia, and the Russian autocrat, and a crowd of minor Princes, professed their willingness, and even their anxiety to secure to their people such popular privileges, such liberal reforms, such freedom of speech and participation in domestic legislation as might be suitable to their various degrees of intelligence and civilization. It never for a moment occurred to them, though it did to their more practical and logical advisers-that such things were in fact and in principle absolutely inconsistent with despotic and unlimited power; that the two could not dwell together in unity or in peace.

The Kings and Autocrats reasoned with the ordinary strength of royal minds-like children pursuing their fancies as facts of history.